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| Love Among the Greats |
| Edith Pearlman |
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| Winner of the 2001 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction |
| Book of the Year Award 2002 Honorable Mention |
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Fiction
160 Pages
ISBN: 0-910055-80-7
Paper $15.95 |
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Winner of the first annual Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, Love Among the Greats is a magnificent world tour of characters, tones, and fictional structures, all of them brought with a stunning restraint and clarity reminiscent of Joyce's Dubliners.
Edith Pearlman's characters are children, old women, young men, rabbis, toy makers, lovers, invalids, immigrants, schmoozers, angels, and fools; all of them perfectly real and accessible, all of them drawn with a kind of comic quietude that only excellent writers can sustain.
Readers are going to love these polished and unusual stories.
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| Edith Pearlman has published stories in The Massachusetts Review, Yankee Magazine, The Antioch Review, and The Kenyon Review, among many other journals, and has twice been included in Best American Short Stories anthologies. Her first book of stories, Vaquita (Pittsburgh, 1996) won the Drue Heinz Prize for fiction. |
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| Praise for Love Among the Greats |
"Storywriter Pearlman (Vaquita, 1996) probes memories of first love and loss over many lifetimes in her confident-voiced, tightly constructed second collection, winner of the Spokane Prize for Fiction.
Pearlman catches an admirably diverse array of characters in her wide net, ranging from an unnamed bourgeois family summering on the north shore of Massachusetts, whose ambitions and ages coalesce over the construction of a boxed puzzle ("The Jigsaw Table"), to a sympathetic team-up of an aged seamstress and her middle-aged customer after a devastating fire ("Fitting"). While the stories start out with unassuming premises, Pearlman's knack for the telling detail and her detached, gently ironical voice prove a winning combination. "Fidelity," for example, begins with ailing octogenarian Victor Cullen's latest dispatch to the editor of his travel magazine normal enough, except that Victor has made up the dateline and invented a whole world that doesn't exist. By surreptitious degrees, it is revealed that victor's wife has had a late-life affair with Victor's editor, Greg, and the last dispatch becomes Victor's swan song and biting tribute to married love. Some of the tales lack this strenuous aim toward a satisfying conclusion, such as "Chance," in which a synagogue's ceremonial acceptance of a Torah from Czechoslovakia devolves into a young girl's rites of maturity watching the revered participants over a night of poker. Three of the stories, including the title piece, concern a divorced young Jewish woman's courtship with and eventual marriage to a black pediatrician and Baptist, allowing Pearlman to explore the often fraught territories of trust and possession.
A writer at the peak of her acumen whose strong, assured work will not miss its mark."
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—Kirkus Review.......... |
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| "Most of the stories in this elegant collection disprove Tolstoy's maxim. The families in them are both happy and different. The stories have a simplicity and lack of action that are reminiscent of Joyce's Dubliners. A family puts together a jigsaw puzzle, a poker game is played, a stranger moves into an apartment building. The notable exceptions are the title story and the related two stories surrounding it, all about a woman named Michal. These stories have more action (divorce, remarriage, a stroke, and a baptism) but are less successful. By the end of the third story about Michal, her personality is still fuzzy; more time is spent on the "eggplant" color of her second husband's skin than on who either of the characters are. Love Among the Greats also contains an embarrassingly written sex scene. With the exception of these three stories, Pearlman's characters are interesting and real, the writing elegant and concise. This quiet collection is perfect for solitary reading and reflection." |
—Marta Segal Block, Booklist |
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